everything & nothing

Hey you, smile, you’re alive.

It seems as though everyone (myself included) is so quick to complain and cling to the negative in every situation. Why is it that it takes an unknown force to knock us on our ass? To humble us? I almost wish there were as many “Hey you, smile, you’re alive” signs as there are “We buy and sell your gold here” signs. There are people with life threatening illnesses, there are people who have lost their homes and loved ones to natural disasters, there are people who will never know what its like to wear a real diamond or to travel to another country. Yet those of us that enjoy certain luxuries, have not lost anything of monetary value due to some freak storm, and aren’t fighting for our lives in a hospital bed somewhere find it entirely too difficult to just be grateful and happy, and shouldn’t it be the polar opposite? Shouldn’t those with incurable diseases be the ungrateful and complainant ones? We go to a fast food restaurant and they put onions on our sandwich when we requested it without, what do we do? We bitch and moan about it for five minutes completely oblivious to the fact that there are children in our very own cities wondering when, where, and how they will get their next meal. What about complaining about waiting to be seen at the hospital? There are countries who don’t even have medical care, hell there are United States citizens that don’t even bother seeing a doctor because they have no health insurance. What about when they don’t have that “super cute” blouse in your size? Yet there are people forced to wear the same dirty garments everyday. What about complaining about gas prices? There are people that cannot even afford a vehicle (let alone fuel) and therefore cannot find a job and/or get hired because they have no “reliable means of transportation”. The list is endless and I could go on for days with examples. In no way am I saying that I am exempt from the ridiculous amounts of complaints that we, as a society, make daily but as a whole I do believe that we need to take a step back from this extreme consumerist civilization that we are creating for ourselves. We need to be happy to be breathing, we need to laugh at having to peel the undesired onions off that cheeseburger, we need to be able to roll our eyes at having to dig through the coin collection in our sticky ashtray for gas money, and we need to have the ability to just accept the things we cannot control.  I guess my whole point is that we should be grateful for what we have and to be happy in the minute that we’re living in. We are never promised tomorrow, hell, we were never promised anything.